Understanding Modern Physics: Download Leonard Susskind Video Lectures

in Online Courses, Physics, Science, Stanford, Video - Science | July 20th, 2008

What’s the “the­o­ret­i­cal min­i­mum” for think­ing intel­li­gent­ly about mod­ern physics? Here’s your chance to find out. Below, you will find three cours­es (the first of even­tu­al­ly six) pre­sent­ed by Leonard Susskind, a Stan­ford physi­cist who helped con­cep­tu­al­ize string the­o­ry and has waged a long-run­ning “Black Hole War” with Stephen Hawk­ing (see his new book on that sub­ject here). Freely avail­able on iTunes and YouTube (see below), these video lec­tures trace the begin­nings of mod­ern the­o­ret­i­cal physics, tak­ing you from Isaac New­ton (or New­ton­ian Mechan­ics) to Albert Ein­stein’s work on the gen­er­al and spe­cial the­o­ries of rel­a­tiv­i­ty. Notably, these cours­es were orig­i­nal­ly pre­sent­ed with­in Stan­ford’s Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies pro­gram, which means that the con­tent was pitched to an audi­ence much like you — that is, smart peo­ple who don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly have an exten­sive knowl­edge of physics. Watch the video below — the first lec­ture that kicks off the series of cours­es — and you will see what I mean.

Final­ly, in case you’re won­der­ing, the next three cours­es (cov­er­ing quan­tum mechan­ics, elec­tro­mag­net­ism, cos­mol­o­gy, black holes, and more) will be pre­sent­ed this com­ing aca­d­e­m­ic year and, once taped, we will give you a heads up. Sign up for our RSS Feed and you will be sure to get an update. Also see our col­lec­tion of Free Online Cours­es for many more cours­es along these lines.

Mod­ern Physics: The The­o­ret­i­cal Min­i­mum

  • Clas­si­cal Mechan­ics (Fall 2007) iTunes YouTube
  • Quan­tum Mechan­ics (Win­ter 2008)  iTunes YouTube
  • Spe­cial Rel­a­tiv­i­ty (Spring 2008) iTunes YouTube
  • Ein­stein’s Gen­er­al The­o­ry of Rel­a­tiv­i­ty (Fall 2009) iTunes YouTube
  • Cos­mol­o­gy iTunes — YouTube
  • Sta­tis­ti­cal Mechan­ics iTunes YouTube

Bonus Mate­r­i­al

In 2006–2007, Susskind taped a sep­a­rate series of lec­tures on Quan­tum Mechan­ics. You can down­load them as free video lec­tures as well:

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Neuroscience and the 2008 Election

in Current Affairs, Science, UC Berkeley | July 17th, 2008

How does mod­ern neu­ro­science make sense of the cur­rent McCain-Oba­ma race? Have a lis­ten to Christo­pher Lydon’s fas­ci­nat­ing con­ver­sa­tion with George Lakoff, a pro­fes­sor of cog­ni­tive lin­guis­tics at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley (iTunes — MP3 — Feed — Web Site).

Lakoff is the author of the new book, The Polit­i­cal Mind: Why You Can’t Under­stand 21st-Cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can Pol­i­tics with an 18th-Cen­tu­ry Brain, and he’s essen­tial­ly argu­ing here that the Democ­rats have tra­di­tion­al­ly framed their argu­ments with a cold ratio­nal­ism .… and lost … while the Repub­li­cans have ground­ed theirs in a kind of emo­tion­al­ism that squares with how the brain func­tions. But, with Oba­ma, things are start­ing to change…

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E=mc²: Einstein Explains His Famous Formula

in Physics, Science | July 14th, 2008

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Will Google Kill Science?

in Google, Science | July 1st, 2008

Not an obvi­ous con­clu­sion, I’ll agree. How­ev­er, Chris Ander­son, edi­tor of Wired, presents the argu­ment like this: as all sorts of data accu­mu­late into a vast ocean of petabytes, our abil­i­ty to syn­the­size it all into ele­gant the­o­ries and laws will dis­ap­pear. The sto­ry is the cov­er of this mon­th’s issue of Wired but I came across it in a newslet­ter from The Edge, a group of thinkers try­ing to pro­mote a “third cul­ture” of online intel­lec­tu­al thought.

Ander­son­’s argu­ment isn’t real­ly that the sci­en­tif­ic method will dis­ap­pear, but rather that cor­re­la­tion will become as good as it gets in terms of ana­lyz­ing real-world data. Every­thing will be too messy, noisy and chang­ing too quick­ly for prop­er hypothe­ses and the­o­rems. As Ander­son puts it, it will be “the end of the­o­ry.”

The nice thing about read­ing this on Edge is that the newslet­ter comes with sev­er­al crit­i­cal respons­es includ­ed from “The Real­i­ty Club,” which includes thinkers like George Dyson, Kevin Kel­ly and Stu­art Brand. But I say that as the con­sumers and pro­duc­ers of most of these mass­es of data, the vote should lie with you, read­er: does Google’s brute force approach to data hord­ing spell the end sci­en­tif­ic ele­gance?

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Stephen Hawking’s Explosive New Theory

in Physics, Science | June 27th, 2008

Arti­cle begins: “Prof Stephen Hawk­ing has come up with a new idea to explain why the Big Bang of cre­ation led to the vast cos­mos that we can see today. Astronomers can deduce that the ear­ly uni­verse expand­ed at a mind-bog­gling rate because regions sep­a­rat­ed by vast dis­tances have sim­i­lar back­ground tem­per­a­tures. They have pro­posed a process of rapid expan­sion of neigh­bour­ing regions, with sim­i­lar cos­mic prop­er­ties, to explain this growth spurt which they call infla­tion. But that left a deep­er mys­tery: why did infla­tion occur in the first place?” The rest here.

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Superstring Theory Explained Dynamically

in Science, Video - Science | June 26th, 2008

“In clear, non­tech­ni­cal lan­guage, string the­o­rist Bri­an Greene explains how our under­stand­ing of the uni­verse has evolved from Ein­stein’s notions of grav­i­ty and space-time to super­string the­o­ry, where minus­cule strands of ener­gy vibrat­ing in 11 dimen­sions cre­ate every par­ti­cle and force in the uni­verse.” If you want to get deep­er into Greene’s work on string the­o­ry, I would rec­om­mend refer­ring back to this pre­vi­ous post.

This dynam­ic pre­sen­ta­tion was made at the TED con­fer­ence. (PS You may also want to see Boing­Bo­ing’s new post: Top 10 TedTalks.)

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No Ice at the North Pole

in Science | June 26th, 2008

The chance of ice dis­ap­pear­ing this sum­mer? 50/50. Wor­ri­some, I’d say.

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The Gas Mileage Illusion (and the Future of Electric Cars)

in Business, Science, Video - Science | June 26th, 2008

Giv­en the sud­den nation­al obses­sion with the price of oil & gas, it seems worth flag­ging this bit of video put togeth­er by two pro­fes­sors from Duke Uni­ver­si­ty. Some may find their per­spec­tive on gas mileage rather obvi­ous, oth­ers not. Either way, it can’t hurt to get their point across.

Sep­a­rate­ly, here’s a quick piece on the state of elec­tric cars and when they may be ready for prime time. You’ll learn here about the Tes­la Road­ster, a high-per­for­mance elec­tric sports car, that goes from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 3.9 sec­onds and gets the equiv­a­lent of 256 miles per gal­lon. Pret­ty impres­sive, even if it costs $109k.

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